Francis Santana: “When I was ten years old, I found Pablo Neruda gathering dust on a bookshelf—that’s when poetry became the only language I could speak to my first love. When that first love looked away I wrote to myself about solitude. When in that solitude I began to see my sisters and my brothers being carted away around me, I had to come out and speak up, to write beyond myself. I do get lost sometimes, mostly in the type of anger that supersedes tact and drowns the tenderness required to mend bullet holes. And the truth is I want to give up more often than not, but to hang back is not an option. I write to be heard, to keep away from extinction.” (twitter)